


What Didn't Stay in Kiev

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Bisexual Steve Rogers, First Kiss, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 12:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3173206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This wasn't what Sam wanted to do today--maybe now he would know better than to share his weird stories about Steve with the rest of the Avengers. </p><p>Things just always got out of hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Didn't Stay in Kiev

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gsparkle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/gifts), [feraldanvers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feraldanvers/gifts).



> About a week ago I received [this ad](http://36.media.tumblr.com/a2c65998a38ad9bde17f8e48960c5dc0/tumblr_nhs3ycSghA1qbumq9o1_500.png) in my email from ThinkGeek and couldn't stop laughing about it. The ensuing conversations with gsparkle and discreetmath inspired this. 
> 
> This got away from me. I really don't know what happened.

How they got on the subject didn’t matter--the fact was that they had arrived there, had looked around and nodded to each other, had decided to set up camp. If they were to really keep on with the metaphor, they might have even said Natasha had pulled out of thin air the most elaborate camp chair in existence and was already sipping on some well-chilled lemonade-- _through a bendy straw_. She was ready to go. Get the show on the road already, her eyebrows taunted silently.

“I highly doubt Cap is the All-American Boy Scout everyone else in the universe likes to make him out to be,” Tony had muttered, and that was that.

Eyes widened, they all leaned forward in their chairs and looked like they were all about to burst waiting to see who would start spilling first because no, no, of course Steve Rogers was not some media-scrubbed golden boy in real life. They had heard the stories from the war; hell, they had heard him through the ceiling on the floor above after he had stubbed his toe.

“I forgot you weren’t there for Thor’s birthday,” Bruce said quietly. Everyone else at the table nodded, faces so blank of expression that Tony knew they had to be hiding something--except Thor. Thor was trying to stifle his laughter in his hand.

“It was--” he paused, collecting himself. “It was indeed a most enjoyable and enlightening occasion, Stark.”

Tony tried to seek out Natasha from across the table and she pointedly avoided his gaze, looking triumphant as hell doing so to. Lips pursed into a tight smirk that was loosening into an all-out grin by the second--this was exactly where she wanted to be.

“So…” Tony said. “What... _did happen_... on Thor’s birthday?”

He couldn’t have scripted that silence better: it was sweeping and sudden and wrapped around each leg of their chairs and probably managed to get out the window and briefly tap Steve on the shoulder, wherever he was. Despite all this, it was short lived.

“Well, aside from stealing the Argentinian flag from that bachelorette party--”

“--when we got home, Clint got naked and tried to fight Sam for control of the couch--”

“--I thought you weren’t going to bring that up, _god_ \--”

“--I became so immersed in the festivities I forgot glass smashing was frowned upon in Midgard--”

And finally Natasha swiveled in her chair with a full-blown beaming set of teeth shining down on Tony, chin in hand. “Steve hooked up with three people that night. At the same time. One of them was a drag queen.”

No one quite heard what Tony muttered after that but no one was really torn up about it. The damage had been done. The gates had been opened and their campground was settled. Dig up the fucking dirt. Make a list for--what, what exactly? To vaguely allude to during press events in some sort of weird betting scheme? (“No, Clint,” Bruce said. Clint wasn’t the only one who pouted.) But honestly: how could Steve and a drag queen possibly be topped?

Natasha said she heard him muttering terrible things to his crotch trying to pull on a pair of skinny jeans while on the run from STRIKE. When Bruce tried to fix Steve’s laptop, his search history was full of increasingly distressed questions timestamped around 3:45 am about the Howling Commandos porn parody, ranging from “don’t they know anything about World War II” to “why didn’t you at least get Dum-Dum’s weird sex stuff right, he literally told us about it every other day,” and then finally, “HOW DID THEY KNOW THAT HAPPENED ONCE.”

“Wait, pause,” Sam said, holding up a finger. “How did they know _what_ happened once?”

“Wh--I don’t know!” Bruce said. “Why do you think I would know?”

Anyway.

A few weeks ago, Clint found Steve playing the new Mario Kart by himself and shouting obscene things to Yoshi every time he got passed. “And oh, what could he possibly be saying that’s so”--a pause for air quotes-- “‘ _obscene_ ,’ dearest Clint? Well, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. So many curse words. So many creative curse words! And then he told good old Yoshi he was going to murder his entire family if he threw another banana at him, and Steve took a solid five seconds to realize what he had said and look horrified about it.” He held up his hand. “Five. Count ‘em.”

“That’s not so bad,” Natasha frowned. “What? Don’t look at me like that, Clint.” When she held up her phone, there was an extensive bullet point note, all in Russian. “I’ve been waiting for this moment my entire life.”

That was when everyone learned that Steve knew every bit of pre-war slang for gay sex. “He said it was the neighborhood where he lived,” she said.

“Who cares where he learned it?” said Tony. “You told me not even five minutes ago he went home with a drag queen--”

“Who could blame him?” Thor interrupted. “The singing performance earlier that evening was phenomenal!”

Sam held up both of his hands and the chatter died--not completely, but to the point where it was just Tony muttering to himself again. “Now I appreciate all these wonderful stories as much as the next guy, but you know what would really shock the public?” He paused, cocking an eyebrow for dramatic effect (and getting a chuckle out of Natasha), clearly waiting for Tony to shut up and listen. “We all know Steve. We all know that unless it’s something worth getting righteously indignant over”--with a flourish of a salute--“Steve is not going to act angry about it. Or even get angry about it. It’s inhuman, we’ve all said it at one point or another. But what if I told you that--”

“What’s with this tone of voice, dude, are you selling us something or what?” Clint half-laughed, and Sam rolled his eyes.

“So I never told you about the towel incident our first three days in Kiev last summer?”

 

* * *

 

When the trail for Bucky had turned cold in Washington, the only logical thing to do was follow the physical evidence they held in their hands. The dossier said Kiev, so they went to Kiev. Neither of them knew a thing about Ukraine, much less how to even pronounce anything written in the Cyrillic script, and the first thought that ran through their minds as they attempted to check into their hotel was that maybe they should have planned this whole trip out a little bit better.

Correction: Sam was thinking that, to an extent. He knew Steve wasn’t thinking that. When would Steve have ever thought that? Steve knew how not to say “plan” in every language that had ever existed--including English, Sam suspected.

The flight over had been long, far longer than either of them had suspected for going to Europe. Two layovers in Chicago and Vienna and nearly two full days later, they were grossly tired, a burning sort of gravity pulling at their muscles, and far too aware of how they hadn’t changed their clothes since taking off from Dulles International.

They arrived at their hotel room and dropped the bags to the floor, vaguely staring around the room and possibly considering whether it would have been best to lay down where they stood or to take the extra few steps to the bed. In the end, they did neither: it was mid-afternoon and they were Avengers, and in theory that warranted some degree of responsibility.

“Listen, I’m gonna go find us some food,” Sam said, hands massaging his forehead. “Like, real food. I can’t face anymore of that airplane shit. In the mood for anything specific?”

“No, I’m going to...uh, take a shower,  I guess.” If the serum had taken the night off, there would have been some serious bags under his eyes to match the frown and cowlicks he was sporting.

It had been a rough start, and they had expected a rough start as well as a rough rest of it, but they had also expected certain parts to get better. On his way back to the hotel about an hour later, Sam was fairly confident in just about everything they were going to do in Ukraine. They had gotten there in one piece, they had gotten a room with fake names, and he had managed to pantomime an order for two huge bagfuls of food that he didn’t have the slightest clue about. They’d called it varenyky, bublik, holubtsi, and it smelled incredible, and if he could order food the first day, they could definitely decipher the dossier. And if they could decipher the dossier, they could find Bucky and start trying to end this nightmare.

Optimism on Avengers missions, Sam learned time and time again, was so often sorely out of place.

The room was a bit of a wreck when he stepped inside, but it was the kind of mess that knew it had been a worse mess not so long ago. It was a self-conscious mess, and Steve was sitting in the middle of it on one of the beds with damp hair and similarly dampened mood.

“Does jet lag normally do you in this bad, dude?” He carefully placed the bags of food next to Steve on the bed--he was just hungry, Sam reasoned. Everyone gets a little hangry sometimes.

“There weren’t any towels in the bathroom.”

Sam frowned. “What? Why wouldn’t there--”

“I mean, it’s a hotel, you think there’d be towels, but there weren’t, so I was standing in the bathroom naked and soaking wet, without towels, and it was awful.”

Steve wasn’t looking at Sam, or anything in particular it seemed, just the Void where someone, somewhere, was responsible for this towel travesty and needed to recognize their transgressions immediately. They had pissed off Captain America and they were going to hear about it.

The food was getting cold, too, but Sam didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

“Did you...call the front desk to ask for towels?” he ventured.

“That shower wasn’t magic. It didn’t make me fluent in Ukrainian mid-shampoo.”

What Sam wanted to say was this: I cannot believe Captain fucking America is so irate over towels, get a hold of yourself, you didn’t even get this visibly pissy when you were on the run from SHIELD, _it’s just a fucking towel and you look plenty dry now so relax_. For a moment he also considered listing the things a reasonable person of his abilities would have done, such as checking the translation tool on their phone, for fucking example. But the moment passed when he saw Steve’s scowl deepen slightly. Not worth it, not now.

“I mean, you look dry. What did you do?”

It was then Sam took a look around at the mess, really looked at it, and his eyes fell upon his bag, tucked into the space between the desk and the dresser and spilling open with clothes that he knew he had not packed that haphazardly. There were some dark spots on the t-shirts near the top of the pile.

“Dude, no. No you did not.”

“The zipper on my bag was stuck. I was desperate.”

“So you used my clothes as a towel? I was going to wear this one today,” he said, holding up a shirt emblazoned with Georgetown Basketball. The entire front of it was a shade darker than the sleeves. “How do I know you didn’t use this to dry your ass?”

The anger had subsided. Steve’s scowl had melted into a mix between a grimace and that sad smile he always did when his life got tragic, which was often, and while Sam was glad on some level that he had diffused that ridiculous situation--

“You know what’s got to happen now right?” Sam looked over at Steve’s own bag perched next to him, open, with the zipper looking a little bit mangled at one end--and looked back. He frowned, the type of frown whose shadow cast the definite line of a smirk if you looked hard enough, and Steve’s face as the dawn of realization broke over it was something Sam was going to relish for a long, long time.

“No--”

Before Steve could even think about standing up, Sam had already vaulted himself forward to the bag, grabbing the first items of clothing he could get his hands on, and scrambled to the other side of the bed. His knees lost traction on the comforter, which slipped as Steve finally assembled his wits long enough to roll and reach for Sam’s ankle, latching on right above the line of his sneaker.

Somehow they both thudded loudly to the floor by the foot of the bed in the struggle, still linked at Sam’s ankle.

“Sam, no--”

“Let go of me, _I have to take a shower_ \--”

Sam had started to try to crawl, Steve’s clothes tucked under one arm, but the man was a deadweight. Sure, he was glad Steve had that serum in him after the helicarriers, saved his damn life and definitely his own more than once, but now he wasn’t so sure. Now the serum was making reaching his one goal, this one single thing he _desperately needed to fucking do_ , the most incredibly impossible endeavor he had ever undertaken. How were you supposed to make it to the bathroom with Captain America hanging off your foot like a piranha?

“Don’t do this, we can figure this out at the front desk--”

“ _Oh now you’re saying let’s talk to the front desk_ \--”

“I had a moment, Sam--”

“And I’m GOING TO HAVE MINE IN THE SHOWER.”

He managed to move his captured leg enough to get in a small kick, which took Steve off guard long enough to clamber to his feet and into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. Not half a second later, Steve was banging on the door.

“Sam, let’s just talk about this.”

“No, Rogers, that’s what you get. That’s what you _get_.” The banging got louder, the doorknob and hinges rattling against the wood, and Sam hopped up to sit on the counter by the sink to examine his winnings. A plaid flannel button-up, one of those Under Armor deals where Steve refused to figure out his real size, a vintage-style SSR t-shirt--he tossed that one aside, but hung the other two very carefully on the empty towel rack above the toilet. “You know, if you break down the door, we’re gonna have to answer a lot of questions about why Kevin Baker of South Dakota can knock a door off the frame with his bare hands.”

The knocking stopped but was replaced with a short huffy sigh and a litany of muttering which, no doubt, included cursing that would probably scald the ears of everyone who held those Certain Ideas about Steve Rogers.

 

* * *

 

After a certain point, it became far too difficult to keep going on with the story with the faces Clint was making and his near-constant tapping on Natasha’s arm. Sam was fairly certain that if he didn’t say something soon that Natasha was going to make Clint regret the tapping and possibly many other things.

“Cap got that upset over towels?” Tony said once it became apparent Sam wasn’t going to continue. “He actually got that worked up?”

“He did.”

“And you played into it?”

Sam opened his mouth to argue, but Natasha cut across him: “Every couple has to have a lover’s spat every once in a while, right?” She wouldn’t drop it. She would never drop it. Steve had warned him about that: she had been so intent on hooking him up with someone since before he and Sam had officially met, and once Steve had come out and they had gone on The Great Search for Bucky Barnes, she would not relent. (There wasn’t anything there, not yet at least, not from what Sam could tell, not that he had been thinking about such things fairly consistently for a while, but he didn’t mind. He was flattered anyone could think Captain fucking America would be into him, anyway.)

(But that was grossly beside the point.)

“ _What_ , Clint?” she finally sighed.

“When is Steve getting back to the tower?” He was trying not to let his grin tear across his entire face but he was failing miserably, and everyone present began to connect the dots. The picture looked a lot like something Sam was both not interested in reliving and also very much interested in seeing--from a distance, mind you. From a distance. Tony’s eyebrows slowly rose, Thor laughed loudly and clapped his hands together, and Bruce looked like he wanted to find new friends.

Bruce made eye contact with each one of them in turn before running his hand over his eyes. “Bucky’s visiting hours at the hospital ended about half an hour ago, and Steve said he was going for a run afterwards, so--”

Clint stood up quickly, his chair half toppling over and threatening to take him down with it. “Aw--ow, anyway. Perfect.”

 

* * *

 

This wasn’t what Sam wanted to do today.

Natasha and Clint knew from their weekly workouts with Steve that he liked to frequent the ninetieth-floor hall showers by the gym when he was feeling more gross than usual, and Tony had noted how much harder Steve would run after his visits with Bucky. All signs pointed to him using the showers when he got back, which would be soon if Bruce was to be believed.

Everyone but Tony was all gathered around the corner, Thor and Clint’s arms full of every single Stark Industries towel the room had once stored. Bruce and Sam exchanged a couple eye rolls, but both of them knew that if they couldn’t just walk away. Someone had to supervise these children, after all--though to be fair, Bruce was probably counting him among the ranks of the children considering who sparked this ridiculous endeavor.

“Okay,” Tony said breathlessly as he ran up to their tight circle. “I had to convince JARVIS to do it, but he’s on board, and--”

“You had to argue with the AI that you designed?” Natasha deadpanned.

“-- _aaaand_. All is a go. JARVIS said our beloved Captain just stepped into the lobby and boy, is that guy in for a shower.”

So they waited. They tossed the towels behind a large potted plant Tony didn’t remember putting there and checked their watches and phones and _waited_ \--for the regret to him them like a Chitauri fist to the face, Sam knew, but no bother. They would learn. More than once Natasha had to tell Clint to stop making these high-pitched noises with his mouth--“What kind of agent are you, Barton?”--and after a while they began to get more impatient than they probably should have been.

“Was he going to walk all the way up here?” Natasha muttered.

“Maybe he ran into Pepper,” Bruce said, clearly bored.

“Or maybe--wait,” Tony said, and he crawled to the corner to peek, everyone else following close behind, even Bruce. “There he is. Target spotted.”

And there he was--bangs matted to his forehead, sweat stains in clear patterned splotches across his back, Steve was indeed in need of a shower and possibly a number of other things if the way he was carrying himself was any indication. His eyebrows were pinched and his gait was slow and shuffling as he went into the shower.

“Maybe this isn’t such a great idea, guys,” Sam whispered.

“The ball’s already rolling,” Tony murmured. “Not much we can do about it now.”

Sam wasn’t sure he believed that, but they could still hear JARVIS from down the hall--

“Towels? I’m so sorry sir, there aren’t any in this bathroom. Mr. Stark--”

Steve’s reply reached them as garbled, undecipherable, but definitely with an edge of frustration.

“Captain, Mr. Stark recently equipped this bathroom with his new automatic drying technology, so I assure you, if you would just take your shower, everything will be just fine--sir, I know you prefer towels, but--sir-- _sir_ , please, this technology is better than towels--I. All right, sir, very well.”

Nothing from the room drifted down the hallway until they heard a vague hiss from the shower head, and Clint nudged Sam. “Man, you weren’t kidding. I’ve never heard him argue with JARVIS like that before. I mean,” he shrugged. “There was that one time JARVIS didn’t get the DVR settings right for the dog show--”

“That was you,” Natasha said without even looking at him.

“Either way--”

“Shut up, both of you,” Tony tossed over his shoulder. “What’s the status, JARVIS?”

“This is absurd, sir, and I don’t quite see the point.”

Sam watched Bruce nod slightly to the AI’s voice and sat back against the wall next to him--he still hadn’t been able to finish the story, and it was a pretty good story, he thought. By the time Sam had gotten out of his shower and used the flannel and Under Armor as best as he could to dry himself as best he could, he had walked out of the bathroom with the shirts tied around his waist to actually get dressed to find Steve sitting sullenly by Sam’s bag and an apology already ready to hop off his tongue. And it was no big deal, people crack, people have weird tics, and if they were going to be there for a while, they might as well go get some damn towels. What Fury and Natasha had failed to mention to either of them, though, was that the standard-issue phone translation system was absolute garbage: instead of merely asking for towels at the front desk, their translated word choices had them end up demanding them, and rather rudely. One boisterous bilingual row later, Steve and Sam had managed to insult all the concierge staff’s mothers and get themselves kicked out of the hotel.

“Hope you’re happy,” Sam had said as they walked up the block.

“Hope you’re happy too, you know, considering.”

“Yeah, yeah. Wasn’t that nice of a place, anyway.” He had reached into the one bag of food that they were able to carry with them and rifled around. “You want a bublik, man?”

“A--a what? A boob lick?”

“Wha--no. No, man, I am _not_ licking your pecs. It’s a fucking bagel and _would you like one_.”

Those Ukrainian bagels were the punch line and he didn’t even get to tell it.

And it had been a successful trip, despite the bumpy beginning. After ten days, they had enough information to head back to the US, and three weeks later they had found Bucky staring, lost, in the history section of one of the New York public libraries in Brooklyn. Sam had developed a thing for Ukrainian food in the meantime and had a bublik when they tracked him down. Avoiding looking at Steve entirely, Bucky had given Sam a once over, gaze lingering on his outstretched hand with the food. “Bublik,” he had said quietly, Sam nodding and trying not to notice how Bucky’s conflicted wince was reflected in Steve’s face.

“JARVIS?” Steve’s voice echoed down the hall and Sam finally noticed the void of sound that was present without the shower running. “JARVIS, how does this automatic drier thing work? I can’t find the on button.”

“Oh geez,” Bruce muttered, and Clint waved behind him to try to get him to keep quiet.

“It should be directly to the right of the towel rod, sir.”

“There’s nothing here, it’s just tile.”

“Have you tried pressing the tile, sir? Mr. Stark has been experimenting with minimalism lately.”

“It’s still not doing anything. I’m not this clueless with modern technology, jesus--JARVIS please help me get this thing on, I have to head back down to the hospital really soon. They’re releasing Bucky today and I’m trapped naked and sopping wet in this bathroom and the only things here are really dirty clothes and I just don’t need this right now--”

Sam slowly swiveled his head until he was staring at the rest of them, and he really, honestly, truly wished he could go back in time and make the Falcon project include giving him the ability to kill--or possibly just hurt very slightly--with a look. With the expressions he was getting in return, though, maybe it actually did. Clint and Tony were pointedly looking at different parts of the floor, eyes wide and grimaces growing by the second, and Natasha’s hands were cupped around her mouth.

“We’re a bunch of assholes with bad timing,” Bruce muttered.

“Oh, this is not ideal at all,” Thor agreed. “At least Sergeant Barnes is able to come home--that is one bright side, correct?”

Sam craned his neck around the corner to try to hear what was spilling from the bathroom door--it was escalating, only this time Steve wouldn’t be able to wrestle JARVIS to the ground.

This _really_ wasn’t what he wanted to do today.

“You guys owe me. You really, really owe me.” He stood up and stripped off his shirt, tossing it on Clint’s head. “This’ll teach all of us to try to fuck with an old man like that,” he added lightly, and thankfully they laughed. Anything to get them to _not_ notice he was pulling off his jeans and boxers too. What a mess. Natasha nodded and frowned approvingly--of what there were a number of possibilities, but he hoped it was because of his noble sacrifice. Not that he didn’t--regardless, Clint was rolling his eyes, having only moved Sam’s shirt enough that it wasn’t blocking his eyes anymore.

“Um, what exactly…” Thor was staring. Sam was going to take that as a compliment. Everyone else had at least managed to avert their eyes by then.

“Bruce, I know you have a water bottle in your bag,” Sam said with an outstretched hand which was soon holding the massive hard plastic thing Bruce toted around everywhere. “Again: you guys owe me,” and he emptied the bottle’s contents over his head. “This looks freshly showered, right? Right. Whatever, I’m not listening to you guys anymore.”

Oh, this so was not what he had planned to do today, but he still stepped into the Stark Tower hall naked as the day he was born anyway and dripping to boot. Vaguely, his own words echoed in his head-- _Captain America needs my help, no better reason to get back in._ Well--technically back out of his clothes, but the principle remained. That was what he was telling himself.

“JARVIS. WHERE ARE THE TOWELS.”

Both Steve and the AI finally shut up, and a moment later Steve’s head poked out from behind the door to the showers, his eyes widening. “You too?”

“Yeah, Cap, me too. Serves us right, huh?”

Steve laughed, exercising lines on his face that sorely needed it. “I suppose so.”

“I know a quick and discreet way to where they keep all the linens and stuff if you want to--”

“No, I think I’ll...uh, yeah. I can, um. Is it far? I’d just rather…” His mouth pinched into a straight line and he struggled to even look at him.

“It’s cool, dude. I’ll be right back.”

He ran back to the hiding spot where, unsurprisingly, the five of them were still rooted to the spot, and he tried to grab the towels as quickly as possible, even if just to avoid hearing any of their lovingly-prepared quips, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough.

“I’m pretty sure this is a porn trope,” Natasha whispered to his retreating figure.

“I’m pretty sure _this_ falcon”--he held up his middle finger behind him--”doesn’t care."

By the time he was able to drag Steve out of the bathroom, they had vacated the area, save for a small wet spot on the flooring from Sam’s quick thinking.

Steve barely paid it any mind, casually stepping around it as they headed to the stairwell that led to their apartments. “Do you want to come with me to get Bucky?” he asked quietly. “I, um. I want someone else there.”

“Sure, man, I’d love to. Just--not like this,” he added, and Steve laughed again. It was a sound he could really get used to.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later, the three of them were seated in a booth at Veselka on 2nd Avenue--it was 3 am, none of them could sleep, and it was a two-to-one vote on what they were craving, so Ukrainian it was. Again. Steve was fairly certain that if he ate another pierogi that the serum would start thinking he was actually a pierogi and react in new and frightening ways, but if it made Sam and Bucky happy, then he could deal with the consequences.

“Did I ever tell you about the towel incident in Kiev?” Sam said with a mouth half full of kielbasa, pointing his fork at Bucky.

“Sam, please. No,” Steve groaned.

Bucky’s mouth upticked into a grin, impish and youthful in a way that defied the lines under his eyes. “ _You_ have a towel incident with Steve too?”

“I take it you also have one?”

“One?” The meatball that was on the end of Bucky’s fork flew off the tines the way his arm flourished dramatically. “One? No, I have”--he paused to count--“no less than fourteen. See, what no one could believe, even back in the war, was that Steven Grant Rogers can be a total _asshole_.”

“Thanks, Buck.”

“I said ‘can be,’ not ‘always is forever and ever,’ Jesus Christ, you punk,” he said with the inflection of fake frustration. “Though the first time was when we were just kids and you don’t seem to have changed much, so maybe I’m wrong.”

Steve grinned and looked back down at the pierogi he had been chasing around the plate with his fork, and the grin remained as no one dared venture down the paths of the number of embarrassing stories they could tell.

It was nearly five thirty by the time they made it back to the Tower--Bucky collapsed on his bed in Steve’s apartment immediately, murmuring something about how the hospital beds had been tearing up his back, but Sam and Steve lingered in the kitchen.

“You want some coffee?” Steve offered. “You get up around this time anyway, don’t you?"

“Eh, I’m fine,” he said as he leaned up against the counter next to him. “I wasn’t planning on doing much later today, anyway.”

Steve still apparently needed a bit of a boost, so he bustled around the kitchen measuring the water and ground coffee out into the cheap coffee maker  on the counter. “Maria and I needed to go over some things about Bucky in the morning--well,” he frowned, looking at the clock. “In a few hours.” The coffee started to gurgle into the pot and and he leaned against the counter next to Sam. Looked at him for a few moments then turned back to the generic bit of art Natasha had bought from IKEA and hung without his knowledge. “A few weeks ago. You didn’t really get trapped without a towel and go wandering through Stark Tower naked, did you?” He sneaked a peek at Sam. “JARVIS is a really bad liar.”

“Yeah, you would recognize one of your own,” Sam laughed.

“Whose idea was it?”

“Clint’s.”

“I figured as much.” Steve turned to look at Sam in earnest. “If I kissed you right now, would you promise not to tell Natasha?”

Sam didn’t have enough time to promise in the time it took him to step forward and grab the sides of Steve’s face to pull their mouths together. No, Natasha would not gain the satisfaction of knowing her teasing was hitting a mark, or at least she wouldn’t know immediately. She wouldn’t need to know why Steve had to put away that bit of art from IKEA--it certainly wasn’t because Steve had slammed him against the wall as they had stumbled away from the counter, no, of course not.

Sam was tracing a line of kisses up Steve’s neck, and Steve’s breath was coming ragged when he stuttered out, “Y’know, if you had just opened the bathroom door in Kiev we wouldn’t have had to waste this much time.”

Sam pulled back with a smirk. “I was a little too mad for that... but I don’t hold grudges.”


End file.
